Episode Details

Bob Bailey has been watching this field for sixty or seventy years, and I have been watching it with him, and his verdict is blunt. More dog businesses have failed on the business end than on the dog training end. Veronica Boutelle watched the same thing happen from the other side. She was Director of Behavior and Training at the San Francisco SPCA, where Jean Donaldson's Academy for Dog Trainers ran out of her department, and she would check in with graduates a year later and find them back in the careers they had tried to escape, or picking up part-time work to make rent. Not because they could not train. Because nobody had taught them how to run the thing.

So she built it. Veronica and founding partner Gina Phairas launched dogbiz in late 2003 and are coming up on twenty-five years of teaching trainers the part that keeps the lights on. In this conversation Veronica tells Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey how the SF SPCA brought Chicken Camp to San Francisco by selling tickets to local trainers to cover it, how Bob flew out to headline her grand opening with a night of newly declassified government stories and the raven cameras, and how COVID turned a hastily built free six week program called Survive and Thrive into two thousand trainers from around the world and then into Thrive, the group coaching program still running today. She also says the thing most positive reinforcement trainers need to hear about their rates, and it is not comfortable.

3 Key Takeaways

1. You are running three businesses at once, whether you know it or not. Training animals is one skill set. Coaching the humans who live with the animal is a second, and if you do not change the person's behavior nothing you do with the dog sticks. Running the business is a third. Most trainers invest continuing education in the first one only.

2. Business is a learnable skill set, not a personality trait. By Veronica's count, ten percent or fewer of positive reinforcement trainers come into this naturally entrepreneurial. The rest arrive loving dogs, discover there are no jobs, and realize they have to own something. In her words, these skills are as learnable as the four quadrants, and twenty-five years of watching terrified trainers turn confident is the proof.

3. Your low rate is a message, and it is not the one you think. Positive reinforcement trainers undervalue themselves out of ethics and guilt, then cannot understand why the client went to a shock jock first. Veronica's answer: because you charged half the price, so they assumed you were not as good, and your marketing never suggested change was possible. Not guaranteeing outcomes is not the same as refusing to say you can help.

Quick Lessons

1. Put your own mask on first. If you want to help the most dogs over the longest career, the business has to be financially sustainable. It is very hard to make good decisions under financial stress.

2. Stop running it as a hobby business. A professional service business and a deep love of dogs are not in conflict. Altruism and an entrepreneurial mindset can live in the same person.

3. Social media is the wrong first basket. A brand new business putting all its marketing there is mostly marketing to friends and family. Build the audience before you count on it.

4. Inconsistent marketing is why the cycle repeats. Most trainers market hard when they are desperate, get comfortable, take their foot off the gas, and drop again.

5. Community beats competition. When trainers stopped treating each other as competitors, progress on individual businesses got bigger and faster.

6. Continuing education counts in all three areas. Trainers go back to Chicken Camp more than once because they are a diff